Blog

A blog about App discovery, mobile marketing, and App stores.

Today marks a new beginning for Appsfire as we’re joining Mobile Network Group, one of the fastest growing mobile ad tech companies in Europe.

About a year ago, we took a big bet with Appsfire and decided to leave our prior app discovery activities and focus on developing innovative and native advertising technologies for the new generation of mobile apps. We wanted to make ads look better, perform better and suck a little less. We quickly started to attract interest from the market and to power in-app monetization for hundreds of apps including some of the largest in the world.

Today, we’re happy to announce Mobile Network Group has acquired Appsfire. As an ad […]Read more

This week i had the opportunity to lead an interesting debate at the Influencers series in the presence of many thought leaders from small and large corporations in Silicon Valley. I chose for this occasion to discuss the current status of native advertising and the dark zone in which it evolves.

This may sound counter intuitive as all the indicators and media buzz point to a glowing future for Native Advertising, which we’re told should raise soon 5 billion dollars in spend.

So how something so promising and rising, can be in such bad shape?

For this you have to take another set of glasses and look carefully at […]Read more

Well a few months later we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve managed to convince great names in the industry who are now part of our publisher mobile ad network. This is a great validation for us and a promising milestones for things to come.

Andy Baio has a very thoughtful piece on how the App Stores (plural) could gain by adding a true social layer and help users find better apps for them.

Andy is right. Very little has been done to change the rules.

All the updates we’re seeing with the App store are about preserving the same model based predominently on editorial curation. Even IOS8 is mostly about cosmetic changes and not about a deep revamp that will change the rules. Andy is suggesting to add some identity layer, a way to follow users, get the recommendation from your friends and organizing a feed of information in the App store the same way Apple tried to build it for music and Ping (but with a failed implementation).

Too many developers who want to monetize their app with ads make often the same mistake. They worry a lot about the CPM (i.e. the amount of money they will get for their impressions) and very little about the ad experience. They will care very little about which ads can run on their app, or how they will show up or worse will make the wrong calls about how to create an experience that will not hurt their users.

The natural temptation is to put as many ads as possible: of course, the more ads you have, the more money you make. Wrong! This is the opposite. Because not thinking about the user experience is the fastest way to a huge collection of negative reviews and bad karma.